Health spending - All posts tagged Health spending

President Obama has taken a beating of late over the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, so the White House tried to fight back Wednesday with a little good news of its own regarding Obamacare.

The White House issued a 29-page report that says, among other things, the once out-of-control health spending trends in the U.S. have been tamed to the point where medical inflation is just over 1%.

Health spending growth is the lowest on record, the report contends, up an average annual rate of 1.3% over the last three years. That’s less than one-third the historical average dating back to 1965.

The good news is that spending on health care won’t grow as fast as it has in years past. The bad news is that it’s starting to rev up and still will consume a fifth of gross domestic product within the next decade.

That’s the finding of a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services study released late Wednesday, which shows that national health spending growth will start to resemble boom years beginning in 2014, when expenditures are expected to rise 6.1%.

The CMS study, completed for Health Affairs magazine, says that growth should average 6.2% each year thereafter. That’s up from the recessionary growth of just under 4%, which the industry experienced from 2010 and is projected to continue through 2013.

The study from SNL Financial shows that the combination of insurance plans in nearly all states appear to meet the minimum requirement for the percentage of revenue to be spent on health care, also known as medical loss ratios or MLRs.

Overall, the states averaged MLRs of 86.2% for individual and 84.4% for small-group coverage, ahead of Obamacare’s 80% requirement. And the average for large-group businesses was 89.8%, beating the Obamacare minimum of 85%.

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